


Bearer

by gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-26
Updated: 2011-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-15 02:39:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eridan and Kanaya, from beginning to end. Spoilers for the 1/23 update.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bearer

1.

You study history. Names and dates and battles stick to you like blood does to skin, on land, drying to a lace of dust after an hour of brilliance. On land you spend days- there are days, on land- and you spend days at a time reading the stones of conquerors until you crackle when you walk from crusted names.

And when _days_ is over, however many days that takes, you swim. That is to say, you forget. The individuals and their numbered deaths.

Because you study history, but you are _interested_ in what is left of history after truth’s gore washes away. The clean bones of a good story: that’s what you like to hold, after the fact, in the wet silence of your head.

2.

So this is what you do.

You keep the vertebrae of each glorious victory, stringing them together into new arcs; and you keep the players, recurrent, their roles unchanging, war by war. Not those who were key only by chance; not those who simply received the right weapon at the right time, fools uplifted by chance and powers beyond their ken. No, you gather those who rise every time, of their own strength, just the same under their changing names. You distill a thousand princes to a single faceless figure, his outline nebulous but his core burning bright and true, and then you proceed to admire him immensely, and wonder if you look like him when you glower; forgetting, for a moment, that he has no one pair of eyes with which to compare your own.

As clear or clearer is the memory of the Empress he serves. It doesn’t matter which of the Empresses, because they’re all the same, really, the richness of their veins always telling true

(sometimes it catches you by the throat how royal she is. Royal, and alive, and near: perhaps even now breathing water you exhaled into legendary lungs)

and whether she is the first or the eleven-hundredth of the line, she is high and fine, stern and playful by turns, and though she gives the hero impossible tasks, she waits for him, after. She waits while he fills all the sixteen seas with blood, patiently: her gaze lingering and warm through the glass of her goggles.

From the details remaining about the various trolls who have unsuccessfully attempted to win the fin of an Empress in ages past, you piece together the rival, of the same caste as the hero and his match in all respects but one

(even if in the vividest of your dreams you cut him and he bleeds the wrong hue, bleeds something from directly across the wheel from what is proper, historical, right, and stares up at you with strange eyes)

And he comes into the tail with red hopes but soon finds enmity more satisfying than pity.

The other quadrants are more difficult. Not for him, never for him, great generals don’t have to scrounge to round out their perfect squares, but for you, because conciliation, for you, has only ever come cased in bitterness, like the living meat of a shellbeast in your mouth, with its residue of mucus over muscle.

3.

You meet Vris.

She’s beautiful and irritating and not really worthy of pitched affection from anyone, let alone you, but when she tosses her hair and laughs and beats you to the end you want to dig webbed fingers into her throat, which counts for something. And you are five sweeps old and you can’t expect the to find your soul mate immediately, and- in the meantime her glittering compound glances fill a hole in your bladder-based aquatic expanding and collapsing vascular system that you hadn’t known was there.

That’s worth something. It has to be.

“8mporaaaaaaaa,” she calls you, voice reaching tremulously up past the register of the storm that has both your ships ashudder. “Come and get me,” she types, lighting up your laptop when she’s only a few yards away, her other hand rattling with dice in motion.

You never do.

You worry about that: about why, when you’ve decided to make the best of this unsatisfactory and, if you are honest with yourself, possibly unwilling kismesis, you find yourself unable to really carry it through. Why you find yourself with your back still to the rail, until she sighs and lowers her fist and goes to slaughter children. The military leader you learned so thoroughly by reading and forgetting and fantasizing would never hesitate to grapple with his true-hated foe, you know.

4.

You begin to get an inkling, though, when she introduces you to Kan.

Kan speaks coolly, her elegant diction like the depths of water, and when she talks to you, slow and measured and precise, you can forgive yourself for not following Vris’ swagger down to the piled victims at once. You can forgive yourself for grimacing a little at Vris’ gruesome displays. And while you still cannot conceive of a moirail for your model, your perfect troll, without feeling bile rise in your throat, you can at last picture the dusky balance he engages in with an undeserving but ambitious antagonist; the artful distance maintained between them by a troll with blood like the surface of the sea on a stormy day.

You wish you knew what she looked like. Land dweller, and diurnal at that: exotic almost beyond imagining. You picture someone a little like Vris, but with a more restrained smile and darker skin through which the verdancy of her veins shows only in moments of great emotion, and then fleetingly, like something vivid stirring in the murk of the ocean floor. It doesn’t satisfy you.

Funny how the faces you want most, to hang on your pure bare fiction and admire, are most obscured. And how the faces you know best never look right.

(She says you weary her; she says you do it on porpoise. She laughs.)

5.

The game happens, in a sudden blossoming of dream and nightmare. You knew it was coming: Kan told you. Not all at once, but over seasons, piece by piece until you could fill in the rest yourself.

And you do. You think and think and think until everything is filled in (except the quadrant that really is filled, and how you wish it weren’t) and you just know that this is going to be perfect.

She gets you in. It feels, unmistakably, like history: the moment when the jug of water breaks expanding to a thing with the weight and solidity of years. The moment where the world tilts, like land is sea and a wrecked ship can heal.

Except-

6.

You get your wishes.

Alone, then, you have time to construct ever more elaborate scenarios for your little cast of movers and shakers. When your arms are shuddering from sustained fire, your thoughts are all of them. And because the Empress and the Rival hurt too much to consider (your face still stung from where his fucking mutant eyes dared to lash out, the beams’ overlap so close to her signature Tyrian that watching, your teeth grind down like pearls in reverse, pulled back to their beginnings) you devote loving thought to mounded ash and buried heat. In your mind’s eye, Kan dances, long hips twisting, and the hero and the object of his petty hate are silenced, standing, watching, tolerance made flesh.

You don’t begrudge her never coming to see you, alone of the others. An austispice so perfect shouldn’t be risked on angels.

But when you’ve found a wall high enough to hide behind and observe, for a little, the crowded raging skies, you think she’d have their grace and none of their violence, and her arms would spread like wings to shield hate from hate. And the next time you go out into the fray, you fire a little harder, for what they are and what they’re not.

7.

All of the wishes. All of them.

The battlefield, and you see her, know her instantly, her sign’s shade dragging your eye like a beacon. She does not look anything like Vris, as it turns out.

“Hi,” she says, a flicker of tooth in her small smile.

You say nothing. You can’t speak for happiness. It might not be official, still, but- she fights between you and another, Sollux and Vriska and briefly, terrifyingly, Gamzee, and throughout you are aflame with joy. Drowning in its heat.

It gives way to melancholy when you’re hurled into the Veil with the rest, when you see everything go wrong. A spark remains.

8.

The lighting aboard the asteroid is poor, with none of the poetry of sun in shallow water or of the unending brilliance in your Land, but she wears it well, you think giddily; as well or better than her skirts. The gentle gradation of shadow, which flattens the others and sucks life from their expressions, makes her look calm and wise.

Now, you think. Now. Here, at the end, where desperation illuminates necessity. She’ll do it of her own accord, seal the deal without more than one thought. All she needs is a little push.

You show her Lalonde’s work. You smolder like the best ocean vents. You say:

“We’re goin’ to need more wands.”

Her eyes slide toward you, a gold glimmer under lashes like kelp.

You wait. This is it. She’s going to step in. You have it all worked out, now. Vris was a conflict of romantic interests, and Sollux won’t ever reciprocate for long enough to make the need convincing, the yellow-livered little sponge that he is, but there are no such problems with Rose human. Kan will see that as clearly as you have, and she’ll say-

9.

“Okay,” she says.

10.

No.

No, that’s not how it goes.

“What?” you say.

“Okay,” she says (again), giving you a strange look. “I’ll make you a wand. You can use it to escalate these ongoing tensions with Rose. I’ll even pass on the news to her, if you like, since you no longer have use of a computer.”

You say nothing.

She takes you down to the alchemiter, and after a little fussing, during which you can only stare, numbly, at her narrow back, she produces a wand. You hardly give it a glance. You hear nothing, while she explains its functions to you, cool and careful and uncaring about you or Rose or, you have to assume, fucking anything.

When she presses it into your hand there are no fireworks: no special feeling to tell you that this is destiny, and history, and here. It’s ivory, smooth as her voice in your palm, and when you clench your fingers the carvings on its side bite into skin, like what she was actually saying, all along.

11.

But destiny, sometimes, happens by degrees. It was never holding the wand that was supposed to give you a sense of recognition. It’s not a rifle: the mechanism isn’t attached to its slim belly. There’s no brushed steel or oiled wood to sing of power to his fingertips. Only bone.

When you use it, though. When you follow her directions (which were not, could never really have been, commands).

Then light expands in interlinked globes from both ends, and you can feel it pushing through you even as you see it coiling out into the air; you can feel it. You are abrim with light, light trapped and knotted up in your volume like light in open sea, bent on itself to form an old, almost-forgotten design. Kan smiles, restrainedly, at your elbow, and doesn’t touch you. Doesn’t wrap a hand around your wrist. Doesn’t stop you from stalking away, prize raised.

To hell with romance, you think. With myth. History is history. Here and now you can do anything.

You can feel them, inside you: the waiting archetypes, the triumphs of your ancestors, polished to new brightness. Victory foreseen will be your backbone; pride remembered fanning out to push against curve of your ribs.

(And if, later, after almost everything-

-after purple thick and fast, because she wasn’t the Empress of your imagining, she was a dead end, a child without judgment, without heart-

-and you saw to that, didn’t you-

you saw strong black-tipped fingers tighten around a white lipstick case, and a tentacle of fluid jade move under stone, and wanted, in your bones, your real bones still there beneath calcified memory, for those same greenish fingers to tighten around your wrist-

-to restrain you, to dilute your hate as the sea does blood-

-well. There was a science to it: that was all. You master it soon enough.)


End file.
